Dell Technologies World Dell EMC has added an Isilon H5600 general scale-out file storage cluster node, using a mix of SSDs and disk drives. It comes with a new version of the OneFS operating system, v8.2, which enables Isilon clusters to grow to 252 nodes, storing up to 58PB.

This is the first cluster node count jump for many years – Isilon clusters traditionally have a 144 node limit. The upgrade equips Isilon to cope with much bigger data sets.

An Isilon cluster can now offer up to 945 GB/sec aggregate throughput, darn close to 1TB/sec The OS refresh also increases cluster performance by up to 75 per cent to 15.8m IOPS.

The H5600 offers more capacity and performance than the current entry and mid-range hybrid models but is slower than the high-end hybrid Isilon system.

Isilon hardware range

There are three Isilon hardware product groups:

H5600 chassis.

F800 and F810 all-flash nodes for the highest performance,

H600, H500, H5600, and H400 hybrid flash/disk general nodes

A200 and A2000 nearline and archive nodes

By tabulating the main hybrid range’s hardware characteristics we can see that the H5600 essentially uses the high-end H600’s CPU and memory while retaining the 3.5-inch capacity disk drives from the H400 and H500. It has 20 extra drive bays compared to these systems, and a drive capacity jump from 8TB to 10TB.

This takes the H5600 chassis capacity up to 800TB, almost doubling the 480TB limit of the H400 and H500.

OneFS 8.2 software is available now and the H5600 will be generally available in June 2019.